Hardware Acceleration and FIPS 140 Performance

The SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 processors on the Oracle SPARC T-Series servers provide cryptographic
acceleration in the hardware, as do Intel AES-NI processors. The Cryptographic Framework was
awarded FIPS 140 certificates for its use on SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 processors. OpenSSL was
tested on SPARC T3 and Intel AES-NI processors for its FIPS 140 validation, but its validated
version does not include inline instructions to the hardware.

Note -
The OpenSSL FIPS 140 module that ships with Oracle Solaris does not include hardware-accelerated
cryptography. On an Intel system, OpenSSL makes use of assembly language optimizations for FIPS 140 cryptography.